News

Review: Fiction: Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam

In Dasht-e-Tanhaii, rose-ringed parakeets flock above the gardens and orchards, their whistling prompting the inhabitants to search the skies; a lake said by children to mark the spot where a giant once fell plays host to flotillas of butterflies and moths; lilacs and hyacinths and cherry trees fill the air with a shivering, ripening scent. Everywhere there is a dense, vegetal lushness, the perfectly exotic backdrop to the intensely experienced romantic affairs that play out in the lakeside community.

At least, this is what at first appears to be the case, before we realise, after the novel’s dizzyingly disorientating opening pages, that Dasht-e-Tanhaii is a provincial British town that has been renamed by the Pakistani immigrants who have, in large part, lived there since the 1950s. Far from connoting the pastoral splendour suggested by Aslam’s painstaking, bucolic descriptions of the